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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Animated Spiral Stairs

I was happy when the AL Expansion Pack introduced spiral stairs, but I found them limited in their use. I didn't always want an open spiral staircase. The styles provided by Maxis looked especially out of place in my Medieval Hood. In fact, most of the time I wanted a spiral staircase that was enclosed like the one I have in my own home. This set includes three different types of spiral staircases that are designed to be enclosed by walls on at least three sides. They should not be used as free-standing stairs like the Maxis spiral stairs. Not that they won't function, they just look strange without walls. The stairs in this set were not cloned from the Maxis spiral stairs. They use Marvine's custom animations for spiral stairs and don't depend on the Maxis animations to work in the game. You do not need Marvine's stairs or her animation files for these to work. All the stairs are base-game compatible so even if you don't have AL, you can have functioning, animated spiral stairs.

As previously stated, there are three spiral stair styles in this set...Wood, Stone and Romanesque. All come with left and right spirals and all come with matching left and right handrails that are meant to be used for the first 3 steps when no wall is used to enclose that part of the stairs. The remaining three side should always have walls.

The first spiral stair is the Wood Spiral Stairs.

The left spiral staircase is the master file for the wood stairs. The right spiral staircase and the 8 handrails (4 left and 4 right) are texture slaved to it. The wood stairs default texture in a Maxis match medium wood tone. The download includes three Maxis match recolors in white, light wood and dark wood plus 9 recolors in other various wood textures ranging from fine wood to worn wood. I've mapped the stairs and the matching railings so that the stair's treads and the railing's newel post and handrail can be textured differently than the stair's risers and the railing's balusters . An example of this can be seen in the above screenshot. The stair treads and the railing's newel post and handrail are in dark wood while the stair's risers and the railing's balusters are in white wood.

The next spiral staircase is the Stone Spiral Stairs.

Again the left staircase is the master and the right staircase is texture slaved to it. The default texture is a Maxis match to the game's "Almost Indestructible Stairs In Concrete". The download includes 12 recolors in various stone and concrete textures. The left and right handrails are a Maxis match of the the handrail generated by the games concrete stairs. The download includes 11 recolors in various metal textures from fine metals to rusty and worn metals.

The last spiral staircase is the Romanesque Spiral Stairs.

The left staircase is the master and the right staircase and the left and right handrails are texture slaved to it. The staircase was designed to match the game's "Romanesque Wall in Red Stone" fence and the Romanesque Modular Stairs created by Chrissy6930 of TS2 Creations. The default texture matches the games "Romanesque Wall in Red Stone" and the 7 recolors include textures to match the game's "Patrician Balustrade" white and concrete versions as well as textures to match Holy Simoly's "Old Mason Fence".

All the spiral stairs appear in the catalog under Build/Stairs. I've categorized the handrails to appear in the same category as the stairs to make them easier to find and use in the game.

As a final note, the handrails were made to match the staircases they were designed for, however they can be used with any of the three spiral staircase styles. You can mix the staircases and the handrails any way you like.

The stairs were tested in a vanilla game with all expansions plus M&G.Files are compressed.For the ease of recoloring, I've included the .psp files for the three master spiral stairs since the shadows and highlights are necessary for quality recolors.All custom meshes and textures by me.If you experience any problems, please don't hesitate to contact me via the email contact form on the right side of the main page.

20 comments:

These are awesome! :-) I especially like the wooden ones, they kind of remind me of the stairs in a cottage I stayed in once. I like the EA spiral stairs but they are definitely quite limited in terms of where/how they can be used, so I think I'll use these a lot in my game. Thank you for creating and sharing them! :-)

Very nice! Now I can stop using modular stairs and the OFB stage to make "shorter" staircases.. AND I don't have to use the EA spiral stairs, which really do look odd most of the time. I'm kind of sad that there isn't a wrought iron version but I'll live. :) Thanks Ray!

I am very much intrigued by these stairs Ray and fighting not to take them in game immediately (as it is after midnight for me at the moment). I'm excited about the lot building prospects these hold. There is nothing like inspirational objects to get the creative juices flowing again! Thank you for continuously providing the Simming community with such awesome objects. Wonderful work my friend.